Lee Child - Make Me

Then came Reacher’s search for the right kind of place. Many pleasant candidates were rejected. Finally one was chosen, a traditional Chicago coffee shop, perhaps discreetly updated by a respectful grandson and heir. It had a pleasant atmosphere as well as a full roster of all the required virtues. Which were nearby parking for the Town Car, and inside seating, and a TV screen on the wall.

McCann’s neighbor seemed happy with it. Maybe it reminded her of the places she used to frequent. She folded her bony self into a booth, and let herself be hemmed in by Chang, who slid in next to her. Reacher sprawled on the opposite bench, sideways, as unthreatening as he could be.

All-around introductions revealed her name to be Mrs. Eleanor Hopkins, widow, previously a wife and a laboratory researcher at the university, not only technically literate, but the technical literature with which she was familiar was written, she said, in a very small number of very small ways, in some of the cracks and the edges, by herself, or by people she knew. Or knew of, or might have known of, if she had taken some other job at some other time. She said her career had overlapped an interesting period, in terms of technical progress.

Then she said Peter McCann had lived in her building for a good many years, and they had grown close, in a gruff and occasional and good-fences kind of a way. She said she had last seen him three or four weeks ago. Which often happened. Which was not a cause for concern. She went out very rarely, and it would be a matter of sheer coincidence if she met him in the hallway. And he was gone a lot, anyway, often for days at a time. She had no idea where. She had never inquired. She was his neighbor, not his sister. Yes, he was an unhappy man. Things often turned out badly.

The TV on the coffee shop wall was tuned to local news. Reacher watched it in the corner of his eye. Mrs. Hopkins ordered coffee and a slice of cake, and Chang told her it was possible Mr. McCann had gotten himself into some kind of trouble. Of a sort no one knew. Did she?

She didn’t.

Reacher asked, “Did he seem obsessed about something?”

Mrs. Hopkins asked, “When?”

“Recently.”

“Yes, I would say he did.”

“For how long?”

“About the last six months.”

Outside there were distant sirens, and the dull beat of helicopter blades, maybe a mile away. Reacher asked, “Do you know what Mr. McCann’s problem was?”

“No, I don’t. We spoke very little of personal matters.”

“Was it connected to his son?”

“It might have been, although that tended not to be an up-and-down situation.”

The TV screen showed a helicopter shot of green lawns. Trees. A park.

Reacher asked, “What was the issue with his son?”

Mrs. Hopkins said, “He didn’t talk of it in detail.”

“Did you know he hired a private detective?”

“I knew he intended to take concrete steps.”

“About what?”

“I don’t know.”

“Did you and he talk about technical matters? Given your background and his evident interest?”

“Yes, we talked frequently about technical matters. Over coffee and cake, sometimes. Like this. We explored the issues together. We rather enjoyed it. I helped him grasp the basic structures, and he helped me understand the uses to which they are now often put.”

“Was his obsession a technical obsession?”

“I think not at its core, but there were technical aspects.”

“Was it something to do with the internet?”

On the TV, under the unsteady green picture, was a ticker-tape ribbon, with the words Shooting Victim Found in Park .

The old lady looked up and said, “By a dog walker, I expect. That’s how it usually happens, I think. In parks.”

Reacher said, “What was McCann’s interest in the internet?”

“There were aspects he wanted to understand. Like most laymen he thought of things in physical terms. As if the internet was a swimming pool, chock-full of floating tennis balls. The tennis balls representing individual web sites, naturally. Which is wrong, of course. Web sites are not physical things. The internet has no physical reality. It has no dimensions, and no boundaries. No up or down, no near or far. Although one might argue it has mass. Digital information is all ones and zeroes, which means memory cells are either charged or not charged. And charge is energy, so if one believes Einstein’s e=mc 2, where e is energy, and m is mass, and c is the speed of light, then one must also believe that m equals e divided by c 2, which is the same equation expressed differently, and which would imply that charge has detectable mass. The more songs and the more photos you put on your phone, the heavier it gets. Only by a trillion-billionth of the tiniest fraction of an ounce, but still.”

On the TV screen the helicopter camera zoomed tight on a group of low bushes. There were uniformed cops standing around, and police tape, and a suggestion of a half-concealed figure on the ground, black shoes and black pant legs, under leafy branches. The ticker still said Shooting Victim Found in Park .

Reacher asked, “What exactly did McCann want to understand?”

The old lady said, “He wanted to know why some web sites can’t be found. Which was fundamentally a question about search engines. His image of the swimming pool became useful. He imagined millions of tennis balls, some bobbing up on the water, some trapped deeper down by the weight of the others. So I asked him to imagine a search engine as a long silk ribbon, being pulled up and down and in and out, weaving through the balls every which way, sliding over their wet fuzzy surfaces at tremendous speed. And then to imagine that some balls had been adapted, to have spikes instead of fuzz, like fish hooks, and that other balls had been adapted to have no fuzz at all, to be completely smooth, like billiard balls. Where would the silk ribbon snag? On the spikes, of course. It would slide over the billiard balls completely. That’s what Peter needed to understand about search engines. It’s a two-way street. A web site must want to be found. It must work hard to develop effective spikes. People call it search engine optimization. It’s a very important discipline now. That said, it’s equally hard work to be a billiard ball. Staying secret isn’t easy either.”

Chang said, “Secret web sites imply illegality.”

“Indeed,” the old lady said. “Or immorality, I suppose. Or both at once. I’m naïve about such things, but one imagines pornography of the most unpleasant sort, or mail-order cocaine, and so forth. It’s called the Deep Web. All those smooth billiard balls. Millions of them. No spikes, no hooks, nothing but going about their business with no one watching. The Deep Web might be ten times bigger than the Surface Web. Or a hundred. Or more. No one knows. How could they? Not to be confused with the Dark Web, of course, which is merely out-of-date sites with broken links, like dead satellites whirling through space forever. Which makes the Dark Web more like ancient archaeology, and the Deep Web more like the wrong side of the tracks. Not that either one is actually dark or deep or either side of any actual tracks, you understand. The internet is not a physical place. There are no physical characteristics to it at all.”

On the TV screen an ambulance rolled into the overhead shot, slowly over the grass, lights flashing forlornly, being followed by what looked like a coroner’s wagon. People got out, and joined the cops.

Chang asked, “So how can a person find secret web sites?”

“A person can’t,” the old lady said. “Not from the outside, anyway. You can’t use a search engine, because the sites are smooth. You need the exact address. Not just CoffeeShop.com, but something like CoffeeShop123xyz.com. Or much worse, of course, in reality. A unique resource locator combined with a super-secure password, all rolled into one. Apparently such addresses circulate through certain communities by word of mouth.”